Is the Conservative robocall narrative starting to crumble?

Lawrence Martin is the author of 10 books, including six national bestsellers. His most recent, Harperland, was nominated for the Shaughnessy Cohen award. His other works include two volumes on Jean Chrétien, two on Canada-U.S. relations and three books on hockey.

Here is Anita Hawdur, an Elections Canada officer, in an email a day before the 2011 election, the one in which the Conservatives are accused of attempting to rig the vote by directing voters to the wrong polling stations.

“The polling station numbers given out by the Conservative Party … are all wrong,” she writes to the agency’s lawyer. Later in the day she writes again: “The workers in the returning office think these people are running a scam.” In another, she says that some returning officers are reporting that people making calls falsely identified themselves as being from Elections Canada.

The Hawdur emails, obtained by Postmedia under the Access to Information Act, are among many from agency officials drawing similar interpretations from Conservatives’ activities. The weekend report by Glen McGregor and Stephen Maher, reporters who are in pursuit of the vote suppression scandal like a latter-day Woodward and Bernstein, marks a big advance in the story. We hear for the first time from Elections Canada officials monitoring the situation at the time of the vote.

Though nothing is conclusive, the revelations, which directly challenge the Conservatives’ version of events, can hardly be of comfort to Stephen Harper’s team. The story has become a whodunit with phenomenally high stakes. No democratic government found to have run a widespread vote-rigging operation is likely to survive.

Mr. Harper has denied any involvement by his party in a call campaign to misdirect voters. His 2011 campaign co-chair Guy Giorno, who said that suppressing the vote is a “despicable, reprehensible practice,” has been equally categoric.

In the run-up to voting day, EC officials had a list of complaints from 13 ridings. They found the alleged abuses so serious that, according to the Postmedia report, they immediately contacted Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton. He took a day to get back with a response that denied any wrongdoing, saying the calls were being made to ensure Conservative voters got to the right polling stations. Unsatisfied, EC officials went back to him again before voting began, but he responded in the same way.

The uncovered emails raise a question: if Conservative campaigners were only trying to assist their own voters, why were they giving out, as the Elections Canada officials saw it, false information on polling station locations? And why, if they were only dealing with their own supporters, would there be such a rash of protestations to Elections Canada?

Maybe the Conservatives’ claims of no wrongdoing will hold up. Maybe mistakes were made and calls went unintentionally to the wrong people. Maybe Conservative party headquarters was unaware of some rogue operators in the ranks — though it is an operation strongly controlled from the centre.

It is interesting to note that while many of the 13 ridings in question featured close races, many others did not. In those ridings it wouldn’t make sense for the party to stage a vote suppression operation. Also, since the Tory phone bank operation had hundreds of callers, why has only one among them come forward to admit making bogus calls?

But there are other questions: Why would the Tories stage a phone blitz on polling locations in the last week when, according to chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand, only 61 of 20,000 polling locations were moved in that week? That’s one half of one percent. Then there is the Ekos poll purporting to show the vast majority of poll-location calls went to voters supporting opposition parties. Why would that be? Then there is Michael Sona, the former Tory operative in the Guelph riding, who has referred to the vote suppression operation as being “a massive scheme.”

Anyone wishing to play devil’s advocate could try this theory: The Conservatives, no strangers to questionable political tactics (remember the in-and-out affair?) were aware that in every election there are late changes in polling station locations. They decided they could use this as a cover for a calling operation. If suspicions arose, they could say they were just phoning to get their supporters out and maybe a few mistakes were made along the way.

That’s one theory. It may be far off the mark. But what we’ve learned from the emails of Elections Canada officials raises suspicions. Big ones.

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